File for web page

Official Hardware Nano Family Nano RP2040 Connect
1

I would like to create a file to be stored on the RP2040 the contains a web page. Right now, I generate the page by a sequence of c string constants.
Each constant is enclosed in quotes. When the html is to contain quotes, those quotes are escaped. It's kind of messy. Just loading a file from the program and delivering it to the web client would be much cooler. But how?

2

Because the source files are compiled into a binary, the underlying file system "vanishes", so there is nowhere to load from (unless you also have an SD card or other actual file system). Some languages like Go with //go:embed and even very recently, plain C with #embed allow (you guessed it) embedding a file. But not C++ yet.

If the main complaint is escaping quotes, you can use a raw string, perhaps with a well-chosen arbitrary delimiter that doesn't appear in your HTML/JS/CSS

const char home_page[] = R"~~~(
<html>
  <head>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<!-- etc -->
)~~~";

Otherwise, being able to use actual files is handy; e.g. to edit them as HTML. In that case, you can look at using xxd to convert them to C source as a bunch of bytes.

3

Thanks. Raw string is great. Seems like xxd would have wider use, such as sound files.

4

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